Thursday, February 25, 2010

Another sparrow found by God ...


Little sparrow
Originally uploaded by visiblejoy

"It is said that God knows when every sparrow falls. But I'll tell you a greater truth still: God searches for each sparrow, because each sparrow is holy."
~ Jason Shulman

These profound statements of my Kabbalistic teacher are part of one of his "seed passages" in the Instruction Manual for Receiving God. This particular passage is about needing only conscious awareness -- in our embracing ourselves, without judgment -- to feel God.

I have sat with this passage now for 3 days. The first two, feeling the words swirl around dizzily in me, unable to write, because of the vastness and bigness of what I felt inside and around me. What Jason is offering here is also what Bill W and Dr. Bob must have experienced in the way they were able to feel God and his messages in order to write the Steps and the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Kabbalistic teaching, we learn that every longing, desire, yearning, aching, reaching, seeking is our wanting to be whole. And in our wanting to be whole, we are attempting to feel and be in relationship with God in some fashion.

What has rocked my interior and my world by this passage is that I had always believed you had to be seen and seated in a particular way in order to experience God. To be worthy of God's love and attention. That this ordinary little sparrow that I am would have to work hard to achieve this kind of contact -- reserved for very spiritual, holy people who practiced in deep meditation, with certain rituals. As a child, sitting and daydreaming in my church pew next to my mother, I didn't feel a connection to God at all. I was terrified of what I perceived God to be. After all, his son was depicted so graphically, hung up, nailed to a cross, because he died for our sins. And if I was to be considered "good" and worthy of God's love, what was I being asked to do ? It felt scary and unattainable. Besides, I was so confused by the mixed messages: if I sit here in this house of worship and am considered a "child of God" but when I leave and go to my house and I hear the names my father calls me and now I feel bad and ugly inside, who am I to believe ??

I have to repeat Jason's words again: "God searches for each sparrow, because each sparrow is holy".

This brings me into the throws of the bottom of my alcoholism. I was a sparrow unable to fly. I would just hop around the ground, searching for scraps. On the morning that I would decide that I alcohol would never touch my lips again, I was soiled in piss and shaking and trembling and completely broken. Why didn't I pour that vodka into the orange juice as I had done for countless mornings in order to get through the day? What call did I finally answer that morning that I could not hear or did not want to hear on other mornings ? I have to believe that God searched for this pitiful sparrow. To grasp that even in that moment of brokenness, God would consider me holy is a very hard thing to swallow -- even now. And yet, I know that this is the truth, beyond a shadow of a doubt. When I think about those men from the shelter that moved me to tears on Monday night, the ones who were eating out of trash and living among rats, and God found these cast-away sparrows too. And seeing them through my own God-self lenses on Monday night made them beautiful and holy to me.

I realize that in my moments of healing over these past couple of years, I have felt closer to God the more that I have embraced all of the parts of me, even those parts that I wanted to cut out and throw out. The judgments still show up, yet are less and less over time. When I have been able to tend to my smaller selves in their places of great fear and despair, I know that God is right there helping me to hold them. When I have laid on my floor, wailing and snot running down my face, and asked for God's help, that there is holiness in that space. Every time I say the 3rd Step or 7th step prayers in the morning and I am turning my will over and asking that God shall "have all of me,  the good and the bad",  I am entering a place of conscious contact with myself and with God.   Talking aloud to God in the shower, in the car, in the kitchen, laying in bed at night or on my knees, I sometimes feel nothing or I feel this overwhelming presence and I have to trust that no matter what the actual experience of feeling is, God is here.

I have spent a great deal of my life believing I was a lost, abandoned, unloved sparrow. And It took many attempts at flying and falling down and getting back up again to understand that God has always been here. It was only when I viewed myself as separate from God that I was lost, abandoned, unloved. It is an entirely different story when I understand that God searched for me. Searched for each one of us. To take the magnitude of this in ... the tears keep coming and coming. And my heart swells and swells.

One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Patty Griffin, wrote a song that moves me so deeply, called: "Top of the World". When I've seen her in concert, she introduces this song by saying that it is in the voice of a man who has died and is looking back on his life with regret, wishing to have developed a relationship with God, with the people in his life. I am grateful in this moment to know that this kind of regret will NOT be my experience.

Cause everyone's singing
we just wanna be heard
disappearing every day
without so much as a word,
somehow ...

Gonna grab hold
of that little songbird
take her for a ride
to the top of the world
right now ...

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